Medieval Capital Markets

A Cat with Nine Lives. Rural History in the Netherlands after 1900

“…Two of his PhD students wrote important theses on capital markets and commodity markets in late medieval Holland. 61 In 2010 Van Bavel fijinally published his magnum opus , the synthesis Van der Woude had wished for ten years earlier. It is an overview of the economic and social history of the Low Countries from 500 to 1600.…”

Tine de Moor’s ‘Silent Revolution’. Reconsidering her theoretical framework for explaining the emergence of institutions for collective management of resources

“…Thus, by clubbing together and pooling their resources, small peasants were able to afford a plough, which in turn they pulled and operated together in teams, and which in turn fed into a system based around the collective management and cultivation of the fields (Rösener 1985, 151;Langdon 1986). This kind of situation was even more applicable in societies marked by poor or distorted access to credit and capital facilities -indeed rural credit did not permeate through to the medieval countryside of Western Europe in equal measure (Schofield and Lambrecht 2009;Zuijderduijn 2009). At the same time, in societies characterised by a large proportion of their inhabitants with access to the modes of production, a wide section of the population had interests in collective investments which would directly benefit them such as drainage facilities and the fencing-off of pastures.…”

Risky Institutions: Political Regimes and the Cost of Public Borrowing in Early Modern Italy

“…A second set of scholars emphasises the role of state monopolisation of violence. Here the argument is that security has economies of scale, and since jurisdictional fragmentation hinders the development of impersonal rule, it significantly increased transaction costs (Volckart 2002;North et al 2009;van Zanden 2009;Zuijderduijn 2009). Comparatively low levels of feudalism and clerical influence in the Italian republics should thus be associated with low interest rates.…”